It depends a bit on how you have your blog pages set up. For the most part, if you use image thumbnails that are no wider than 530px when inserting an image it won’t break out of the layout or anything like that.

As for displaying a blog post without the featured slideshow at the top, no I don’t believe there is any setting to allow for that. You can however choose to have the preview thumbnail (as shown in the blog overview) be not shown on the single post page via the theme options.